Pontiac Township High School held its first Community Café event at the Pontiac Family Kitchen Nov. 5 to openly discuss current steps that the high school is taking to improve or increase community and parent engagement.

Superintendent Jon Kilgore and Principal Eric Bohm led the event with about 20 in attendance.

“We wanted to hear their concerns,” said Kilgore. “We wanted to listen to their ideas and share with them steps that we are taking. The idea was that we would meet off campus and we would share information with the community and parents about school improvement initiatives, survey results and then open it up for discussion on anything that we wanted to talk about to help improve things — from communications, to more parental involvement and other initiatives that we have going on.”

The idea for the event came from a group called the PTHS School Community Council, which is made up of parents, administrators, board members and faculty. The group planned this event and will be reflecting on the results as well as other means of increasing parent and community communication.

“I can tell you that it will happen again this spring,” said Kilgore. “We will have an event designed using the ideas that we got from the first community café and it will be done in such a way so that parents can come to specific topics. I am hoping to have a short meeting for everyone that breaks out into topics of interest and small group discussions.

“I can’t speak for all the attendees, but a good number of them shared with me that they appreciated the opportunity to receive information and for the high school to be open to listening,” said Kilgore. “I think that was the most important part of this. It was the first step in broadening our engagement and our collaboration with the community and parents.”

Discussion during this first café event tended to focus on the attendance incentive program. Dialogue was exchanged on the purpose of the attendance incentive program and the philosophy behind it.

“We had some good philosophical discussion there and we addressed the valid concerns that we don’t want kids coming to school sick, but we understand that is something we need to continue to monitor,” said Kilgore. “So we are actually going to be doing some follow-ups specific to the attendance incentive program, the results of which we will be able to share at the next event this spring.”

One thing that the high school wants to stress about these events is that they are a community engagement, intended for parents and members of the community. Kilgore said while he recognizes that it’s important for parents to be invested in their schools, those who aren’t parents might also be interested for two reasons: they are already paying taxes for the school and community businesses need skilled and educated people working in their businesses and the high school provides good future employees.

Page 2 of 2 - “They need us to be doing a good job. So we are opening this not only to parents, but to the community as well,” said Kilgore. “I think when you are at a session like the Community Café, you have an opportunity to hear more explanation, examples, details and data from steps that we are taking that you can’t always read on a website. At the café, not only can we explain it, but we can answer questions based on the explanations that we give and the website doesn’t directly provide for that.”